by Greg Proops
The Classics
Come back to black and white. When the stakes were high and dolls were not always on the up-and-up. World wars were personal, like in Casablanca, Lifeboat, and Grand Illusion, testing people’s mettle and morals and straining humanity to find its heart while enduring the worst circumstances imaginable. Honor and love and treachery and fear and hate and killing all while smoking wherever you damn well pleased. Classy she-devils like Gilda and Kathie were made to tempt the right guys. Guys who would never kill their partner over a dame—or would they? Step into the glorious past where people actually tried to be articulate and there were no Adam Sandler movies.
CASABLANCA
Michael Curtiz, director, 1942
The real great American picture. Underneath the happy accident of commerce meeting patched-together screenplay meeting commercial success are dozens of true stories of personal triumph over the forces of evil. There is so much more to this movie than one viewing can contain. Nefarious drunkard Rick (Humphrey Bogart) loved Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), Ilsa left him crying in the rain in Paris. Rick is now in Morocco, running a saloon where all the iniquitous types hang and ply their shady trades. One day Ilsa walks in, and damned if she isn’t married to Victor Laszlo, the freedom fighter. Victor is virtue itself, wears a white suit, and orders a champagne cocktail. If you had just escaped from a concentration camp, would you have the sangfroid to wear white and be that cool? Everyone who worked on this movie has an amazing story of fighting persecution. Bogie was a civil rights advocate who defied the McCarthy witch hunts. Paul Henreid, who plays Victor, refused to join the Nazi Actors’ Guild when he was in Vienna. Later he protested the House Un-American Activities Committee with Bogart and was blacklisted. Hitchcock picked him up, and he became a TV director. Peter Lorre had to run for his life after being a star in Germany. Marcel Dalio, the croupier, escaped from the Nazis with his wife, Madeleine LeBeau, who plays Bogie’s girlfriend. Dalio lost family in concentration camps, and the Nazis used his face on posters as an example of “a typical Jew.” S. Z. Sakall, or Carl the waiter, fled the Nazis, too, and lost three sisters in the death camps. Conrad Veidt, who plays the evil Nazi Major Strasser, also left Germany with his Jewish wife to escape incarceration and torture. Almost all the bit players escaped from Europe. But beyond the backstories of the actors, Casablanca is the great triumph of commercial filmmaking. It is funny, sad, stirring, emotional, and hypnotically manipulative. When was the last time you were proud of characters? Watch it and see if you don’t well up. I dare Citizen Kane to make you cry.
LIFEBOAT
Alfred Hitchcock, director, 1944
My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine.
—Tallulah Bankhead
Tallulah Bankhead was a hot, top star of the stage on both sides of the puddle. Girls waited outside her dressing room, and they usually got what they wanted. She was an outrageous character who makes Angelina Jolie look like a nun. Her screen career is spotty, ending with the obligatory horror movie in the ’60s, but Hitchcock knew her magic was right for this picture. She is what we would now call fierce, but fierce is a poor adjective to describe her fabulousness. She eats men and women for lunch and then gets high over their prone bodies. She had to climb a ladder into a giant tank of water they were shooting in. She did not wear unmentionables, and every day the boys of the crew cheered her. This is her movie, and she wins it, but Alfred Hitchcock could make a movie about a sofa entertaining. He takes the one setting of a group of distressed survivors in a boat and spins it out so you are dazzled by the staunch acting and massive character development. This movie, like his later movie Rope, proves you can do it all in one place if you have the nerve and a great plot.
In another director’s hands, this could have been a typical-for-the-time-period propaganda war movie. But instead, Hitchcock takes a story by John Steinbeck and a top-notch cast turns out a terrific thriller where there are no good guys or bad guys—just people trying to survive in an impossible situation. The set, place, time, and plot all boil down to a group of survivors in a lifeboat after a German submarine attack in WWII. A glamorous reporter (the fabulous sexpot and outrageous party doll Tallulah Bankhead in her greatest role) sporting a mink coat in the ocean, with matched luggage, has to make way for all the other victims, one by one, in her lifeboat. The rich guy, the blue-collar guy, the dutiful nurse lady, the dedicated black sailor, and finally, a German refugee—oder ist er? Over the course of an hour and a half, a movie shot in a huge tank in Culver City explores the meaning of life, love, race, loyalty, and what constitutes murder during a war. Everyone got hurt in the giant water tank. Broken ribs and whatnot. Wasn’t it Hitchcock who said actors are cattle? In this case, they were seals.
THE GRAND ILLUSION
Jean Renoir, director, 1937
What is right and what is wrong when the very morality of the world has been shaken by Satan? WWI was called the war to end all wars. Sadly, it wasn’t, but it was the end of empires as we knew them. Royalty, class, and snobbery have been replaced by déclassé megacorporations and news graphics giving catchy names to our conflicts. England, France, and Germany would never be the same, and the technological world of cars and phones replaced carriages and top hats. This profound musing is perfectly put together by Jean Renoir. Oui, his father was Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the famous painter, so they are a divine artistic daily double. What do you do when your father is a genius of painting? Out-genius him at filmmaking. This picture stars Marcel Dalio from Casablanca and the immortal French tough guy, Jean Gabin, sort of a French Spencer Tracy meets Robert Mitchum, or Harrison Ford meets Mickey Rourke, if you will, thrown together in a German prison camp in WWI. Aristocrats and common types deal with the ever-changing world while trying to survive and escape. Erich von Stroheim, the maniacal director of silent classics Greed and Queen Kelly, is the very movie cliché of the German officer wearing jodhpurs, sporting a swagger stick and a monocle, but he plays the commandant suffering a leather neck brace as the ultimate gentleman officer flipping over the cliché and our expectations. He dines and hobnobs with the enemy officers because they have so much in common, but does he have the heart to let them escape as honor provides? Grand Illusion is the end of the world of aristocrats and the beginning of mass warfare without swords and gallantry. In a prison camp we find beauty and longing. Human, cruel, lovely, moving, and perceptive about the way we are, this picture gets better all the time.
OUT OF THE PAST
Jacques Tourneur, director, 1947
Film noir has elements and guidelines: detectives wear trench coats and smoke out of the side of their mouths. Dirty rats get theirs, and smokin’ sloe-eyed dames are not to be trusted. Cabbies know the score and will wait for you all night and hotly pursue any car, no explanation required. Kingpins send their torpedoes to shake a guy down who’s only trying to make an honest buck. Not all dames are the same, some are worse. Your partner is your partner—even if he’s a rat. Striped shades cast a shadow across the room. A single desk lamp is sufficient lighting. Sometimes doing the right thing gets you a long walk on a short pier. The Smartest Book loves film noir because no matter what you are doing while watching, someone on screen is making you look like a saint. This Robert Mitchum picture is a real slice of cold-blooded noir. Moll Jane Greer (Kathie) has shot her gangster boyfriend Kirk Douglas (Whit) in the chest. He ain’t mad at her, he’s just mad she took a bunch of money and split. He wants her back in the fold, so he reaches back to an old acquaintance, Mitchum (Jeff), who is now peacefully running a filling station in a mountain town in Northern California with a handsome deaf teen, Dickie Moore, of Our Gang fame and—yes—the coolest deaf teen in all of filmdom. Jeff goes to find Kathie, and he does find her, again and again. Then happens the greatest exchange in movie history: a pack of lies, delivered on a beach, mid-torrid affair:
Kathie: “You believe me, don’t you, Jeff?”
Jeff: “Baby, I don’t care.”
Fa
de to black. Stay to the bitter end and send thanks my way.
GILDA
Charles Vidor, director, 1946
Gilda is a movie that encourages Rita Hayworth to run wild. This wild ride is one you want to take. Hayworth had the goods: stunning, great voice and dancer, and more sass than all the other WWII love goddesses put together. She is all that and more. This movie, set in a casino in Argentina to make it extra exotic, showcases all of Hayworth’s talents. First, she marries for money to a strange pansexual weirdo named Ballin (the awesomely creepy George Macready), but she is really in love with his right-hand man, Johnny (Glenn Ford). They tussle and tangle, and mad innuendo flies. A bizarre subplot with Nazis jumps in, and we are off to the races. Gilda sings her big number, “Put the Blame on Mame,” in a black evening gown. She takes off one glove in the singing, but we feel as if we have been under a waterfall and seen the source of the Orinoco. Boom. Pow. The colorful character actors all chime in to let Johnny and Gilda know the world is watching their affair and they should behave. Uncle Pio, the wise washroom attendant, is the conscience of the film. He is disappointed in his symbolic niece Gilda and lets Johnny know how little he thinks of him. Veteran Movie Helper Joseph Calleia (Touch of Evil) seems to swoop into every scene with a word of caution. Once when Ballin catches Johnny and Gilda coming home late, he asks where they were and they say they were swimming: “Johnny taught me to swim. Didn’t you, Johnny?” You will never think of swimming the same way again. You will drown in awe. And go home singing the praise of Miss Hayworth’s gowns. Glamorous, dangerous, and kinky—everything a night watching movies should be.
ALL ABOUT EVE
Joseph L. Mankiewicz, director, 1950
A great movie about show business, a great movie about stalkers, a great movie about Women—simply put: a great movie. Bette Davis is Margo Channing, a star at the top of her game. Every night a seemingly hopeless waif, Anne Baxter, watches her show and waits for her at the stage door. One night Margo’s best friend, Karen (Celeste Holm), brings the hapless girl back to meet Margo. When Eve meets Margo, we are off to the races. Margo succumbs to Eve’s attention and fanatical devotion and makes her a personal assistant. But what we don’t know is how far Eve will go to get what she wants, which is Margo’s life. The blinding lights of Broadway in the ’50s, when theater ruled New York, gather at Margo’s flat for one of the great parties in movie history. Marilyn Monroe shows up as a junior bombshell squired by the venomous and urbane George Sanders, as the cynical, self-obsessed drama critic Addison DeWitt. Davis greets him with, “I distinctly remember, Addison, crossing you off my guest list. What are you doing here?” He ripostes, “Dear Margo, you were an unforgettable Peter Pan. You must play it again soon.”
He points Monroe toward a producer and instructs her, “Now do yourself some good.” She asks, “Why do they always look like unhappy rabbits?” “Because that is what they are. Now go and make him a happy rabbit.” That’s all you need to know about showbiz.
Eve is at first loyal and helpful, but we soon start to see her evil plan for sleeping with everyone’s man and taking all the good roles. Addison sees a kindred spirit, while Eve sees an opportunity. We watch in astonished horror as the wittiest group of martini drinkers ever assembled scheme and maneuver their scathingly witty ways through the tempest. It has been noted this movie works on many levels; one, that Eve and Addison are clearly gay and that Margo and her boyfriend Bill the director, and Karen and her husband the playwright Lloyd, have their world threatened by the homosexuals. In the ’50s, it was impossible to say a character was openly gay. So they have to pay the moral price for their turpitude. There is also an element of Women having to know their place in the postwar world of “normality.” This movie kicks those notions around and scalds you with brio. Camp and vicious, sparkling and delicious. Try this gem from Karen regarding her attitude: “The cynicism you refer to I acquired the day I discovered I was different than little boys!” Movie Helper emeritus Thelma Ritter as Margo’s maid, Birdie, holds down the fort: “You can’t fire me . . . I’m slave labor.” And the filthiest entendre in cinema—Birdie, while zipping up Bette Davis’s gown: “Et voilà.” Margo: “That French ventriloquist taught you a lot, didn’t he?” Birdie: “There was nothing he didn’t know.” Eve is prescient to our “reality”-filled era, a conniving backbiter with an endless empty pool of emotional needs to fill, using everyone else to fill it. Bette Davis murders this part. Strangely, she lost the Oscar to the wonderful Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, a comedy, for goodness’ sake. Required while watching: a martini, very dry. If you smoke, this movie is heaven. If you don’t, get an ashtray. Bette Davis lights up more often than a Mayan priestess.
THE BIG SLEEP
Howard Hawks, director, 1946
Bogie and Bacall had met on the movie To Have and Have Not. They started up an affair when she was nineteen and Bogie was way older and married. He tried to break things off and split during the production of The Big Sleep, but it didn’t take. So he came back and they muddled on, but he boozed so much, they had to hold up shooting on this already moody detective flick. Bacall’s nymphomaniac sister is a drugged-up naughty photo star (something you don’t get enough in 1940s movies). Bogart says about her, “She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up.” Dig on recluse millionaires, illegal gambling joints with hot dueling cigarette girls, fake rare booksellers, drugs, and pornography when it was not called adult entertainment: this one really brings home the bacon. Bogie is Marlowe, the hard-bitten cheap detective. Every doll Marlowe runs into is hot for him, and when he finally kisses Bacall, she purrs, “I like it, I want more.” Bacall is the ritzy but troubled dame who spars with him. The plot, taken from a Raymond Chandler novel, is so wildly convoluted that no one knows who actually killed the character Owen Taylor. During filming, Hawks tried to get the answer from the screenwriters, William Faulkner and Ms. Leigh Brackett. But they couldn’t even guess. They then quizzed Chandler, but he also didn’t have a clue. While Chandler may have left some loose ends, the screenplay bristles with his distinct dialogue:
General Sternwood: “Do you like orchids?”
Philip Marlowe: “Not particularly.”
General Sternwood: “Ugh. Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, and their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.”
Pacey, dangerous, the grown-ups act like grown-ups: they smoke and drink and gamble and fight and try to off one another. The Big Sleep is simply fine craft. It will make you love the old movies. If not, it’s your funeral.
SMARTEST BOOK BASEBALL TEAM I
Bombshells, Doxies, and Dames Baseball Club
Sex appeal is fifty percent what you’ve got, and fifty percent what people think you’ve got.
—Sophia Loren
What makes a bombshell? The boom, boom, of course. These ladies raise the stakes. They aren’t bimbos; they are tsunamis. Notice amid the dazzling looks and bodacious frames the great acting, smoking intellect, and genuine heart. While men are a bowl of peanuts to be nibbled at with a drink and then forgotten, bombshells are the whole package and you can’t pay the freight. Bombshells are a force of nature that make you take the bad road. They are built for majesty like the Winged Victory or the Venus de Milo. Movies used to be chockers with them. They have been replaced by the sylphy Jennifers and Kates—nice girls, but that’s exactly the problem. Bombshells have feelings, feelings like you should weep gratefully to be in line to gaze upon them. But as Marlene Dietrich gerwant, “You better be careful, it might be too hot for you.” These babes will blast their way to a pennant. Suit up and let’s play pepper.
Manager: MAE WEST (1893–1980*)
(* Of course, the ages of bombshells are irrelevant.)
Virtue has its own reward, but no sale at the box office.
—Mae West
Mae West blazed the bombshell trail. From the primordial mass of Victorian sexuality, she stormed the bawdy Bastille. Actress, playwright, feminist, sup
porter of gay rights. She hit it big in a 1918 revue where she danced the shimmy. She was so hot, she was the cover girl on the sheet music. Mae wrote a play called Sex, which got her arrested, and she did a week in jail for corrupting the morals of youth. Since this was New York in the wild days, she must’ve done a good job. She signed a movie deal at forty, saved Paramount Pictures, and helped launch male bombshell Cary Grant. Always outspoken and harried by religious groups, she brought the noise and exploited our Puritan misery by being funny about sex. She even cut a few rock ’n’ roll records for good measure. She can lead this group of foxes to victory and beyond.
Catcher: SHARON STONE (1958–)
Stone is perhaps the last great bombshell. Wild in the brain, insane in the body. She eats men for breakfast, and then orders drinks, then conducts an AIDS raffle. Men are not the obstacle; she simply stomps over them in her heels. Males beg for the privilege of losing to her. Strides like a tigress on the red carpets of the world. If she never makes another movie, she has already shelled you with her bomb. You would ruin your life to wait in line to be abused by Ms. Stone. Blond, unrepentant, magnificent, she handles the pitchers and calls the shots. She can handle the squeeze play.
First Base: DIANA RIGG (1938–)
Tall, dark, and awesome, Miss Emma Peel from The Avengers regularly makes the polls as the hottest TV character of all time. She was in a total of fifty-one episodes. That is making an impression. A superb stage actress with loads of awards, she was the only Bond wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Nobody’s fool, never a bimbo as Emma Peel—get it, M-Appeal, Man Appeal?—she jujitsu’d bad guys, was a scientist, a crime fighter, drove a bitchin’ Lotus convertible, and wore groovy cat suits called Emmapeelers over her astounding form. A feminist icon in every way. She causes you to resign your post as head of the English department because she said she might meet you for a smoke in the rosebushes. The first bag is hers to defend. She calls this game rounders.